Hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) products are widely utilized in many applications, including refrigeration, air conditioning, foam expansion, and as propellants for aerosol products including medical aerosol devices. Although HFC's have proven to be more climate friendly than the chlorofluorocarbon and hydrochlorofluorocarbon products that they replaced, it has now been discovered that they exhibit an appreciable global warming potential (GWP).
The search for more acceptable alternatives to current fluorocarbon products has led to the emergence of hydrofluoro-olefin (HFO) products. Relative to their predecessors, HFOs are expected to exert less impact on the atmosphere in the form of a lesser detrimental impact on the ozone layer and their generally lower GWP. Advantageously, HFO's also exhibit low flammability and low toxicity.
As the environmental, and thus, economic importance of HFO's has developed, so has the demand for precursors utilized in their production. Many desirable HFO compounds, e.g., such as 2,3,3,3-tetrafluoroprop-1-ene (HFO-1234yf) or 1,3,3,3-tetrafluoroprop-1-ene (HFO-1234ze), may typically be produced utilizing feedstocks of chlorinated propenes.
Unfortunately, these chlorinated propenes have limited commercial availability, and/or may only be available at potentially prohibitively high cost. These barriers to commerciality are due at least in part to challenges inherent in conventional processes for the manufacture of chlorinated and/or fluorinated propenes, and yet unique relative to gas-phase, free radical halogenations reactions. Because of the unique chemistry involved in the production of halogenated propenes or higher alkenes, solutions expected to be useful for challenges encountered in conventional gas phase, free radical halogenations reactions may not be applicable to these processes.
It would thus be desirable to provide improved processes for the production of chlorinated and/or fluorinated propenes and higher alkenes, such as those that may be useful in the synthesis of HFO's. More particularly, such processes would provide an improvement over the current state of the art if they were less costly not only in materials, but in time expenditure.